“Madame Lesage,” she said, causing me to turn around. “Lanh will be so surprised. So thankful. He will—”
“You may say the money is from me,” I said, interrupting her. “I don’t want him to think that you robbed the Banque de l’Indochine, but I’d rather not discuss it with him. Please ask that he doesn’t mention it or thank me in any way. I think that might make the time that we are in the car together a bit uncomfortable. For both of us.”
“Of course, madame,” she said. “Rest assured that he will never mention it to you or Monsieur Lesage.”
We walked back to the kitchen together, Diep insisting that I let the little girl thank me. She stood up as soon as the door opened. Diep spoke to her in Annamese, her words coming quickly. The girl stared at me, this time square in the face instead of at my midsection.
“Merci, Madame Lesage,” she said softly.
“You’re most welcome,” I replied. I was not going to let the capable mind of another penniless girl go to waste. Indigenous or not.
I went back into the living room, thinking of the nature of women. Of mothers and the motherless. Of young girls navigating the path from infant to mothers themselves. I had walked a very broken path to get to our beautiful house in Indochine. When I was very young, my life was about survival, though I didn’t fully understand it. Now I saw that surviving in the same house as my parents, with so little money, was a feat in itself. When I turned seven or eight, my attention shifted to the survival of others. There were four of us by then, and my parents were certainly losing interest in tending to babies. My mother delivered them and soon went back to trying to feed the mouths instead of kissing the mouths. She was constantly fighting, my mother. Fighting with her husband, fighting with her children, and fighting with herself. And along with this fighting nature came the push to try to fend off the anger and depression that so often comes with poverty. Almost every day, she lost the fight.
When I was a teenager, then the oldest of eight, my childhood was gone. All I focused on was how to keep my siblings alive, how to bring them some joy, and how to get myself out of Virginia so that I could eventually pluck them out, too. I realized that the only thing that made me the least bit special was that I could speak two languages. I took my ability to speak French, the one gift my mother had given me, and did everything I could with it. I became a teacher. I became a working woman with my own humble means. But I wasn’t making enough money to support my siblings—not one had managed to attend college besides me—and as a teacher I never would. I needed more. I needed something outside of the country, the social system I had always known. When I finally got to Paris, I became a woman with only two goals: to stay there indefinitely and to marry a man who could provide very well for me. I found that in Victor, and almost as soon as I did, he provided Lucie, too.
I went back upstairs and thought about the girl in the kitchen. I had hopefully just changed her life for the better. Alone in my bedroom, I looked in the mirror and managed to smile. Maybe I didn’t look that much like my mother, despite my dirty hair. Perhaps I didn’t look that bad at all.
TEN
Marcelle
September 20, 1933
“To the Nguyen home?” my driver asked me as I rolled up my window. When I first arrived in 1930, I always drove myself to Khoi’s house, but with the amount we drank, it proved to be a problem when one night I drove my little red car right into a lamppost. Luckily, the damage was minimal, and Khoi had the car repaired for me before Arnaud even noticed, but he insisted that if we were to drink, I had to use a chauffeur. He said he really preferred my body with my head attached.
“Yes, to Mr. Khoi’s, please,” I told Tuan, trying to sound nonchalant. I slipped him enough money in addition to his salary to know that he would always be discreet and wouldn’t spread the news of my affair all over Hanoi, but I still couldn’t shake my discomfort.